Strange that the Apodization filter focal lengths mentioned are not the ones I would have guessed were of most interest. Portrait FLs would seem to me more appropriate and more likely to have significant bokeh.

OK if I understand apodization correctly, this would be a fantastic thing for the next (not holding my breath) 24 mm TSE lens. It would reduce the little halos you get around light bulbs, right? This has taken months out my life (cumulatively), correcting in photoshop.

OK if I understand apodization correctly, this would be a fantastic thing for the next (not holding my breath) 24 mm TSE lens. It would reduce the little halos you get around light bulbs, right? This has taken months out my life (cumulatively), correcting in photoshop.

And a tripod foot on the lens!!!

I've never seen a TS lens in person. Are they really big enough that a tripod foot is needed? Is there room for one?

OK if I understand apodization correctly, this would be a fantastic thing for the next (not holding my breath) 24 mm TSE lens. It would reduce the little halos you get around light bulbs, right? This has taken months out my life (cumulatively), correcting in photoshop.

If it was strong enough then it could work that way, yes. However, to completely solve your problem we're talking about a strength such as three to four stops of light loss; around double the usual strength of an in-lens apodisation filter. So the 24mm f/3.5 would be something like t/10-16. The more normal two stops of apodisation certainly still reduces both halation and ghosting/doubling of point light sources, and would 'only' leave you around t/7.1, but you'd still need to spend some time in Photoshop to solve it entirely, so then you have to ask if it's worth the bother; you'll still need to edit it regardless.

I've never seen a TS lens in person. Are they really big enough that a tripod foot is needed? Is there room for one?

Tilt-shifts are essentially medium format lenses, so their image circle covers a far larger area than the usual 35mm sensor space. They're also extremely dense lenses, making them heavier than their length and width suggests.

So you can see how the tilt-shift 24mm is wider, longer, and heavier than other 24mm lenses, despite having the smallest aperture, no autofocus, and no IS system. For reference, the Canon 24-70 f/2.8L II is only 20g heavier than the TS-E 24mm, and that's a zoom lens with autofocus, full weather sealing, and an aperture two thirds of a stop wider.

All that said, using some form of secondary support for a tilt-shift lens usually comes from large format use, where you might square the lens with the subject and want to shift or tilt the stock or plate (i.e. the camera itself). This is because with a large format camera, getting the lens aligned right is the harder part, and in many cases the lenses are heavier and more of a pain to shift or tilt than the rest of the camera. Some people are so used to that method that they continue to use the same technique with medium format and small formats. Of the current Canon tilt-shifts, only the 135mm is actually heavy and long enough to potentially require a tripod for the sake of simply keeping the camera stable and steady, and even then, it's borderline. (It's about the size of the 70-200 f/4L IS)

Off topic, Keith Cooper (pro architectural photographer) recently reviewed what amounts to an aftermarket tripod foot for the TS-E 24 and TS-E 17, made by Rogeti. For architectural photographers, the ability to shift the sensor while leaving the lens in place is a big plus, making for seamless, no-distortion panoramas.

TSE lenses aren't so heavy, it's the fact that when the lens stays fixed on a tripod, you shift the camera back and forth or up and down to catch different parts of the big image circle in such a way as to have zero parallax troubles. Where that matters is when you're stitching left/right or top/bottom exposures together into a "panorama". What happens when you shift the lens but not the camera is that your background may overlap perfectly but the foreground will not. Sometimes it's not a big deal, but other times there is a sloping element right in the overlap between images - stair-railings, brick coursing, soffits that recede into a vanishing point. A stationary lens works like a view camera: set the lens and then move the "film" plane to compose, all the while keeping your vertical lines straight and not converging.